I’m very pleased to announce that David Gardner has joined Eris as our Head of Partnerships on our success team. He started on Wednesday this week and will be working out of our London office.
David is coming to us after a break in his “formal” career (which he spent building a music studio!).
After meeting with him for the first time and reading the “proof of work” he had submitted (we screen applicants by asking them to write a little bit before progressing to interview), I was sold that he was a marmot. I ended my notes with this:
Final point: at one stage of the interview I asked…
Q: Theoretically when could you start should an offer be made?
A: Well, I feel like I’ve been doing the job part time now for a little while already, so… immediately…?
That’s the kind of tenacity you want to see out of your business side team who will be responsible for laying the foundations of a sustainable, growth pattern for the marmot-y partners network we want to continue to build. Not only tenacity, but the resonance of what David prepared showed that for a non technical purpose he had a very keen understanding of the value which eris is providing into the market. And when you’re building a company focused on bringing value to developers, it doesn’t so cleanly translate to the non-technical folks. We know that since David “got eris”, that he would be vital to our efforts to “explain eris”.
David will be helping us in two primary areas.
First, and perhaps most obviously, given his title, he will be taking over as our point person for all partnership relationships. Given where eris sits in the stack, as the thing that folks build their blockchain applications on, it is incredibly important for Eris to have solid delivery and educational partners.
In other words, for eris to succeed we have to be embedded in a healthy, flourishing ecosystem of different actors. These partnerships vary and include:
- technical relationships around interoperability of components within the platform;
- delivery partners looking to bring solutions to their clients and customers; and
- educational and research groups looking to have reliable technology provider who has been at the forefront of the industrial applications of the techonology for a long time.
These are a diverse group of folks. Each of which will have a different set of expectations they will be looking for out of their relationship with eris. David is just the human to manage all this complexity as he has a significant amount of experience working with companies both large and small all around the world. He has worked with technical and developer focused products all the way to consumer focused products and has consistently shown himself creative at bringing value into relationships. This makes him, we think, a natural fit for our Head of Partnerships.
Second, David will be helping out with a range of existing problem sets which the Success Team is facing right now. Watching steady growth in our Users is great for me as CEO and Head of the Platform team, but Brian’s Success Team as been, well, Brian. As the first full member of our success team besides Brian, there are a number of things which need tending to. David has not only helped big companies grow but has helped many small companies grow their demand side. Starting in the days when he helped a hard drive startup (which was really selling cinder block sized contraptions) move product. This makes him ideally suited to join our team just now because he can work “all over the stack”, except on the business side of “the stack”.
We look forward to great things from David and you should too! Give him a shout on Twitter and if you’re in London feel free to buy him a coffee and let us know how we can best help your organization get up to speed with the next generation of data and process management infrastructure.